https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/us/donors-choose-donation-ripple.html
There may already have been several mentions of this story in Press, but here's a new article detailing the story behind the $29 million donation. And it's in the New York Times no less!
My way of dealing with this bear market is to remind myself that even if, by remote chance, the worst of the doom and gloom predictions come to pass, I'll still be absolutely proud to have supported this company.

Now, now...from an evolutionary perspective there are no disorders. Just chance differences which can be beneficial or maladaptive depending on the context. As long as you've found a niche where you can make good use of your traits, we as a society are glad to have you on board

It may be your 100th blog, but it reads as if you've put in those 10,000 hours said to be needed for mastery in a craft. Congratulations on reaching such a big milestone, and thank you once again for putting these out there

"SWIFT relies on outdated technologies that cause values to transfer slower than the Encyclopedia Britannica across the web using a 14.4k modem."
Sighhh...I remember mentoring a high school student a few years ago who didn't know what dial-up internet was. I think I blew his mind again a few months later when I explained what the little floppy disk "Save" icon was supposed to represent.

Hey everyone,
In honor of St. Patrick's day, I wanted to share a little side project I've been pondering for a while: Zerpify your own clover!
By using a conversion such as (A = 00, T = 01, C = 10, G = 11) you can convert your secret key from an alphanumeric string to binary to DNA. You can then take this DNA sequence to the nearest university and with a sufficient degree of bribery (or asking nicely) convince someone to clone it into an Agrobacterium vector and incubate a clover flower or cutting in the bacterial solution.
The result? Integration of your secret key somewhere into the clover's genome!
Every time your clover plant propagates, each cell will contain a copy of your secret key. Even if the plant were to succumb to drought/radiation/rabbit attack, there would still be a decent window of time to recover DNA from a few leaves or roots. In fact, because the sequence is so short (<120 base pairs) you'd have a fairly decent chance of recovering the DNA sequence with minimal to no degradation. As an added bonus, the size of the genome (Trifolium repens has 10^9 base pairs, about a third the size of the human genome) imposes an extra layer of biological encryption. Only you and your new scientist friend will know the upstream primer sequence and proper reading frame to "decrypt" (find) the secret key, and only you will know the correct DNA -> ASCII conversion. If you're the paranoid type, replace the first "s" of your secret key with any other ASCII character to protect against brute-force attack.
Now granted, the individual plants are still relatively easily killed. But because they propagate, they can be readily stored in multiple locations including pressed inside books at your friends' houses, or preserved in amber (à la Jurassic Park) and kept in a ring or necklace. It's a bit like the philosophy of blockchain distributing a public ledger across multiple potentially vulnerable computers, rather than a single fortified database.
Of course the lazy single-person way to do this would be to order the DNA sequence (~$100 USD* plus shipping and handling), reconstitute in distilled water, brush onto clover, let air dry, and press into a book/preserve in amber. You won't have genome integration, but anyone sequencing the leaf will also sequence the DNA that's dried on its surface.
...or you can just soak a clover in blue food coloring like I did below.
Acknowledgements: This work was funded in part by a grant from the TTTGV Foundation. R.S. is grateful to the XRPChat community for valuable discussions. R.S. declares financial interests in XRP.
*$0.80/base pair at https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/custom-dna-rna/dna-oligos/ultramer-dna-oligos. If you wish to shorten your binary sequence by using a method other than ASCII encoding, you can drive the price down further. And no, unfortunately that's not the same IDT that's partnered with Ripple.
Disclaimer: Please don't actually plant any genetically modified clovers in your backyard. There is a non-zero chance you could cause irreparable damage to the local ecosystem. You may also be liable to fines and penalties from a dozen different government agencies.

Of course we didn't move the T1000 back in time, don't be ridiculous. We simply found the nearest supermassive black hole collision and pulled it from the next parallel universe over. Of course, this also means it would be useless to ask this T1000 about the future, since it won't even know your past in this universe.
...oh, and nevermind what we were doing violating the non-abduction treaty between Universe 1 and Universe A

Thanks for putting this all into context. I knew there were greater things yet to come (pardon the Chris Tomlin pun), but I honestly had no idea of the sheer magnitude of these money markets. Honestly "tip of the iceberg" doesn't even seem like an appropriate analogy...it was more like seeing one of those diagrams showing how tiny the Earth is compared to the sun.
"Too low they build, who build beneath the stars." -Edward Young

Link between Ripple and non-bovine milk industry confirmed.
Also evolutionary fun fact of the day: mammary glands are actually modified sweat glands. For those of you who were just about to eat breakfast, you're welcome.

I used them up until about a month ago. Was able to withdraw XMR once back in October, but they haven't let me withdraw anything since then so I finally decided to stop donating hashrate. What's your story?

It's possible to create custom tokens using interfaces such as The World Exchange (https://www.theworldexchange.net/). You click the drop-down menu that says "Buy" and choose the "Issue" option. Assign a 3-character name and arbitrary price (this will not deduct any XRP from your wallet). The tokens do not show up in your own wallet, but will appear once sent to another wallet. Bear in mind this will lock up 5 XRP, in addition to the 20 XRP reserved all wallets have.
Currently, the feature has limited utility because Codius is still under development (so you cannot program the tokens to do anything differently from XRP). Hopefully Codius will launch in the next year or two (not based on any timelines from the dev team, just my own wishful guess)

"Even if you’re not into tipping, just be aware that a ‘thank you’ can mean the world to individuals on social media that are expending their own energy to help defend Ripple or XRP"
Thank you for expending your own energy and time to defend Ripple and XRP. It most certainly does not go unnoticed

You know, I'd actually been dreading the possibility of such an announcement and what it might do to our prospects for adoption. But you're right, as long as the technology is as good as we think it is and other institutions are confirming the results, a single partner dropping out wouldn't scare off the major players in the long term. These types of level-headed perspectives are what I really love about this community, thanks for helping dispel another one of those nagging points at the back of my mind.

I've always found a bit of a silver lining in the fact that there's such virulent anti-Ripple hatred from so many angles. If there were any confirmed flaws with the system or the business (as opposed to possibilities of "banks might not use XRP" or "regulations might harm us") you can be sure they would spread that news in force. As a couple of relatively recent examples, IOTA was slammed when it became apparent that their "tangle" technology was unstable, and TRON went down after it became clear there was no Microsoft partnership.
So yes, thank you FUDsters for making my contrarian due diligence super easy. (Now let's hope nobody ever takes the first half of that last sentence out of context to use against me)